Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines how one Australian neighbourhood, and its political allies, came together over a number of decades to protest the inclusion of various groups in their community. An analysis of the campaigns reveals which groups are unwanted in their community and the tactics for excluding them.

Paper long abstract:

The community of West Guildford has a history of standing up for their rights that goes back to the days of the early Swan River Settlement in Western Australia.

I conducted a historical review of a campaign by the community in the 1990s to prevent a pre-release women's prison facility being built in the neighbourhood, and an online ethnography of a more recent campaign against the building of a disability justice centre in the same locale. I also reflect on the campaigns as a past resident of the community and regular traveller through it.

In analyzing the campaigns I draw on Vered Amit's (2012) concept of 'disjuncture' as, in effect, the opposite of community; a failure to achieve community inadvertently or, in these cases, deliberately. Amit suggests 'disjunctures' can be as ambiguous as the concept of community but remain useful 'for thinking about the desires, possibilities and practices through which people seek to modulate or rework their social relationships' (42). She argues that 'disjunctures' can be re/inforced by time, space (place), deflection and redefinition (35), all of which were evident in these campaigns.

These protests were, and still are, deeply embedded in state politics, but a number of politically and socially marginalised groups, including people with disabilities, are revealed to be vulnerable targets in these grassroots protests.